Little Kite Girl

Oh.  The baking.  Tonight I started the Thanksgiving cooking.  I’ve officially washed every dish in our kitchen three times, the table twice, and the floor, I’m not even sure.  A lot.  I’m currently sticking a fork in a pumpkin pie every five minutes.  It’s twin cooked just fine, I have no idea why this one’s slow.

Soooo….I’ve come to a conclusion.  I’ve never liked baking- as a result, I was never the girl who baked some cookies on a Saturday afternoon, or a pie just for fun.  I remember one time I baked some brownies on a Sunday.  My mother and I were both PMSing, and it was the Sabbath.  (No shopping.)  Truly, desperate times.  The mental picture I have of us consuming said brownies looks something like lions eating an antelope on the Serengeti.  Yes.  Anyway, so here’s the conclusion:  I’m very glad I didn’t have a lot of practice baking because I’m finding any methods or tools or recipes I was accustomed to in the world of gluten-ous-flour is absolutely irrelevant and anti-useful  in the gluten-free world.  Totally.

The pie crusts tonight were crazy.  Usually you can just roll ‘em out, pick ‘em up, and stick them on a pie tin.  But not so much with this recipe.  The instructions told me to mix everything together (a process which involved cutting pieces of butter into pea-sized pieces…)  roll them out between two layers of saran wrap.  That was bad advice.  Bad bad bad advice.  So, I switched to wax paper.  That went a bit better, until I realised that it was almost impossible to get the wax paper off the  flattened pie dough.  I finally figured out that I have to put some white rice flour on the bottom sheet, and then peel the top sheet off by ripping the paper away from the center OUT.  I felt like a culinary genius.  Then, I put the tin on top of the circular piece of dough, flip it over, and press the dough into the pan so it sticks.  For some reason, it sticks to the pan more than the paper, so it provides the necessary resistance, allowing me to get the paper off the other side of the dough.

I know.  Tiring.  And I still have two left.

My other project for tonight was carrot butter.  To make it you basically have  to boil a bunch of carrots for two hours and then puree them with a few other ingredients.  Well,  John and I had a very important conversation earlier, standing in Walmart, about whether or not we needed whole cloves or powdery cloves, and whether or not we needed vanilla or vanilla extract.  We made the wrong choice on both accounts, and so I had to become a problem solver yet again.  I ended up forgetting the cloves and adding a mixture of brown sugar, white sugar, and cinnamon to the carrot butter- increasing the caloric content by 1000%.  That’s ok.  I think it’ll taste better now.

Phew.  So yes, taking a small respite before I get to go start the other two pies and clean the dishes and the counters and the floor again.  I hope it turns out ok.  I really, really want to have some good food tomorrow- but I also know that I’ve done my best, and hopefully my boys will know that I love them.  So tomorrow I’ll get to the candied yams, the turkey, and the potatoes and stuffing.  I’m so excited to sit around and eat and watch movies.  I feel like I can take a deep breath for the first time in a couple of weeks.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone :)  I’m sure I’ll be writing some more tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Day to day, Holiday!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.